It is true that the great filmmaker Jen-Luc Godard said that “cinema is life.” The metaphor remains a mystery as it has been agreed for many centuries that works of art are not life but a mimicry or representation. Some critics argue that Godard’s films are self-reflexive. They are his life broken open and he becomes the hero.
“It’s a quibble,” you say. “We know that when Husserl wrote about inner time, this inner time had nothing to do with rocks. Rocks are not alive but they are a side of reality we can taste, smell, and feel. One definition of life is that life is a period of sense interpretation: we are, in a sense, alive when we smell and touch but not necessarily when we are reflective.”
I don’t understand what you intend by bringing rocks and Husserl into this picture or even the notion of smelling. Consider the photograph by Jessica Somer’s called Beckoning Secrets from Unguarded Places. In this photograph, we have a candle, a small book, and a strange looking measuring technology, neither of which we can feel, taste, or smell. The photograph extends two dimensionally across the space of a computer screen, which is itself extending on your table, the table extending et cetera et cetera. The photograph represents a three dimensional scene, which must be imagined. We can imagine opening the small book. We can imagine a time when that candle had been lit, as the wick is somewhat used.
“We can,” you say, “also imagine the taste of limes. We can argue that an actor in a film who is asked to taste a lime, tastes the lime, but instead of informing the audience what it tastes like instead lies to the audience and claims she tastes nothing.”
Which would make Godard’s argument ironic, as the title of a film might be ‘cinema is life’ when what is intended is the opposite.
You say, “In Godard’s films we often watch scenes through a camera that follows the undramatic movements of characters, as if ‘getting there’ is as significant as ‘the dramatic moment.’ Nana, for example, in Vivre sa vie, stands against a wall or smokes a cigarette or enters a room, sits, and waits. The camera is recording this fictional character’s unedited presence. Her life. What matters is not that these things are recorded, but that they are edited to form the illusion of presence.”
You’re moving away from the initial logic. Watch the clouds for a moment. Look out the window. We’re approaching Belfast and soon we will be surrounded by the noise of urbanity. We’ll soon feel the ground under our feet. We have much to look forward to. I will lose you in a crowd of people and feel a rush of loneliness, the kind of loneliness one feels as one scrapes butter across the surface of bread. (Everyone knows that the sound of a knife across the surface of toast is the sound of loneliness.) You will appear out of the Grand Opera House and I’ll follow you to the Crown, where you will have secrets to speak of, items to anticipate, drinks to taste, and love to pursue. Do you see the sky? Can you taste the world to come, filled with limes and hymns?
“You evoke the absurd. I have no use for the Crown. It’s a lie,” you say.
Just the other day, I saw you speaking to the King. I saw you walk to the trash with a rat’s tail in your fingers. Your dog stopped and you stopped with it. I saw you placing things on a table: a candle, a book, a measuring stick. You turned the book on its axis. You waited for the light to angle across the wood grain. You thought about each word of a poem. You pressed the silver record button. While painting, a lady bug landed on the knuckle of your thumb.
“Stop it,” you say. “It’s all a lie. Now pass the lime. Let’s watch the city unfold under us in the night where there’s so much life going on. The city is a dragon with moist scales. The city is the inside of a breathing whale.”
I turn off the light. I go to bed. The lime burns a cut on my finger. It is an undramatic air. Can you see my figure in the dark? Can you see the slices of lime on my wood cutting board?
